Mission: Namibia! Comic Tips

4/29/2021

Mission: Namibia! Comic Tips

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Fun Suggestions for Building Literacy Skills!

Each week we'll share helpful hints on using the comic across the grade level span. I'll add each week's tips here so they are easy to find. If you are new to the comic, be sure to share the backstory of the characters with your students. You can watch the Backstory video on the comic page or read about it on the top of the comic page or click here to read the backstory and get a pdf version to share with parents!

If you need to share comic videos directly with students you can use these safe video links to do so:

Week 1

Pre K: Challenge your students use the pictures to tell this story! What are Curiosity Cat and Data Dog doing? What animals did they encounter? After students make predictions, read the comic to them. They can make sound effects along with you!

Kindergarten: Our new comic series has plenty of reading and word study opportunities for your budding readers! For our U.S. schools, you are nearing the end of the school year so your kinders have more skills now! They'll be able to decode not only sound effects but find many familiar words throughout the comic.
Challenge students to find /oo/ words. This week they'll find words with both /oo/ sounds (as in book and zoo). Brainstorm and sort other /oo/ words!

~ Written by Curtis Bentley ~ Illustrated by Ben Matsuya ~

First Grade: Young readers benefit from working on reading inflection. Reading with feeling increases comprehension and it's FUN! Equip your students with copies of the comic and have them highlight and color code ending punctuation (e.g., all periods yellow and all question marks orange). Then challenge them to read just a single sentence with feeling to a partner. Their partner should close their eyes and listen. At the end of the sentence the listener must try to identify the punctuation of the sentence they just heard!

Second Grade: Print the comic in little book form for this activity. We've included more challenging words in the text boxes this week. Have students mark the ones they find tricky, then write those on the back cover to create a mini glossary! They can add definitions after they consult with friends or other resources to determine the meaning.

Week 2

Pre K: Did you know even pre-readers can use details from text to support their claim? When you share this week's comic with them have them tell you what they think made the tracks leading under the couch. Then have them tell you why they think that! What evidence in the pictures supports their idea?

Kindergarten: This week's comic provides a great opportunity to do some word study focusing on vowels. List each sound effect on a card. (Pro Tip: Give this task to one of your early finishers prior to the activity!) Then sort the words by vowel sounds: short and oddballs!

short vowels; pop, zop, zup, gulp, pip, sniff, gag
oddballs: boing, arf
What's left? "Woof" where does your class think it belongs? Why? You can build on the vowel work last week! You can take this further and sort the short vowel words by sounds too. Sorting and classifying helps children internalize language patterns and helps them be better readers AND spellers!

First and Second Grades: As they year progresses, we've increased the reading challenges in the comic. Many of the tricky words will be familiar by the end of the mission but may seem a bit daunting now. Empower your readers by taking a moment to go on a big word hunt. Arm your eager word hunters with highlighters and set them loose! You call out a big word such as "herbivore" and challenge students to find it in the comic. You can narrow the hunt by working with a single frame or increase the challenge by expanding to a full row or even the whole comic. Continue with more words before reading the comic. By previewing some of the tricky words, your students can have more confidence as they read the latest episode!

Week 3

Pre K: Get your pre-readers involved in a comic read aloud! Teach students the sound effects to call out at appropriate times during the read aloud! Remember to re-read texts again and again to this age group. They'll get better at audience participation with each reading!

Kindergarten: Challenge your students to write the sound effects! It can be scary to take spelling risks for real words, but sound effects are perfect for encouraging invented spelling! Challenge students to add extra sound effects to the comic, or post sound effects for objects around the classroom. Does your clock go "tic, tic?" Does the door "boom" when it closes? What sound goes near your sink? Have fun!

First and Second Grades: Choral reading opportunities support a wide range of readers at once! Divide your class into thirds for this fun reading activity. Project the comic and have one third of the class read Data Dog's speech and thought bubbles, one third read Curiosity Cat's lines, and the third group read the text boxes. You can go one step further and have a captain for each team point to the text to be read. Challenge teams to read with expression! Now, find someone to listen to the class read the comic. Why not invite the principal in to enjoy the performance? :-)

Week 4

Pre K and Kindergarten: Work on predicting and inferencing skills using our comic! Using the .pdf file show just one pane at a time. After you read each pane, have your early and pre-readers predict what will happen next. Why do they think that will happen? What evidence in the text supports their idea? What prior knowledge of the characters can be helpful in making predictions? At the end of the comic, predict what will happen next week!

First and Second Grades: Older students can work on predicting and inferencing too. Try the strategies above, but have students read each pane and then predict what happens next. Challenge students to write and illustrate what they envision happening in week five! Be sure to share what your students create on our publish page. We love to see what you are doing!

Week 5

Pre K and Kindergarten: You've probably been working on all sorts of early literacy skills with your students from letter recognition to concepts of print to sight word recognition! Now is a great time of year to reinforce or revisit those skills and we can help!
Give you students a hard copy of the comic in whatever form works for you. Little books, single panels, or the whole comic would all work. I'd be inclined to use the single panels as the text is larger and may be a better fit for emerging fine motor skills.

Then just follow this procedure:

Give students a specific item for which to search. Maybe it's a letter they need to practice? Perhaps you want them to look for long words, or short words, end punctuation or spaces between words?
Provide an example of their search target on an index card or scrap of paper so they can remember their task.
Challenge them to use a highlighter to mark the item you've asked them to find!

Variations:

Use a timer to see what they can find quickly.
Have teams race to see who can find more examples of the target item.
Project the comic on an interactive or regular white board and take turns locating and marking the target item.

First and Second Grades: This is a teaching and tech tip all in one! You can use most word processing or presentation applications (Pages, Word, Keynote, PowerPoint, etc.) to help you play a mystery word game. Here's how:

Out of the students' view (ideally ahead of time) open the comic pdf and take a screen shot of the nine panel or full page image you want to use.
Paste that image into a document or presentation.
Use the shape tool to create rectangles that cover some of the words in the comic.
Now, reveal the comic to students by projecting or printing the document.
Have students predict what words might be in the missing spaces. They can write these predictions on their hard copy or on a projected image on an interactive or regular white board.
The great thing about doing this as a projection is that you can delete the rectangles at the end and reveal the original word choice.
Share the versions that you create with us! We may like them better than the originals!

Week 6

From phonological processing to fluency to inferencing, you've had so many ways to integrate the comic into your literacy instruction with students this year! What were some of their favorites? The following tip will work for all grades and is super simple, so great for this extra busy time of year.
Ask your students to take a moment to sketch out what they think might happen in the final episode of the Mission 3 comic. Volunteers may even like to share their ideas. Then read the comic and compare those predictions to what actually happened. After reading, can they recall the whole adventure to a friend? What was their favorite part? Why?

Where do students think Curiosity Cat and Data Dog will go next year? We'd love to hear those predictions so please post them on our Publish It! page!

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